My academic career at P.C.S.S. began in September of 1964. The intake of grade nines was an amalgamation of students coming from a number of elementary schools. With such a blended population there was inevitably going to be some friction and a few adjustments to be made while the social pecking order was being established.
In my year there were two boys vying for alpha male status or perhaps they just didn’t like each other. Morgan was starting fullback on the Junior B football team. He was your classic mesomorph; strong, fast and a nonstop flirt with the girls. Tony was the first person I’d met who had actually taken karate lessons. If you paid him fifty cents he would brace himself, tighten his abdominal muscles and you could punch him as hard as you were able square in the stomach. This feat would be surpassed several years later by another individual who would drink a bottle of ketchup if you paid him two dollars and provided the ketchup, but I digress.
These two guys were always arguing back and forth about who was the better at this or who was the best at that. One day in late September or early October they began bickering about who could eat the most. At last, here was a dispute that could be easily settled! It was agreed that during the approaching lunch hour the matter would be resolved mano-a-mano with a pie eating contest in the school cafeteria. A collection was taken amongst prospective spectators and this was used to buy up the day’s supply of pies.
When lunch period began Tony and Morgan entered the cafeteria and sat down across from each other. The rules of the contest were simple – eat until you couldn’t eat any more. Since this wasn’t a timed event forks or spoons were allowed or the competitors could just shove in slices of pie by hand. He who eats the most wins. Either by design or chance the contestants began eating by flavour. First apple pie went down, then cherry, then blueberry and finally the raisin.
Just as he was coming to the end of his raisin pie Tony stopped. His eyes seemed to bug out and he gazed about with a look of frantic desperation. Finding what he was searching for he ran several steps to a nearby garbage can and began to throw up. This was clearly visible to everyone in the immediate vicinity but one astute individual remarked that he was throwing up in flavours. The last flavour down was the first one back up. This clinical observer stated that since we had seen raisin and blueberry go by if his premise was correct cherry should be next up and it was.
Technically speaking Morgan won the Great Port Credit Pie Eating Contest but in competitive pie eating as in life things are not always as they seem. If I remember correctly right after lunch that day we had Phys. Ed. and since it was autumn we were doing a unit on cross country running. How Morgan survived a run of two miles has not been recorded for posterity, but I can’t imagine he enjoyed it.
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